Vivante Corp., a leading designer and provider of graphics processing IP, has announced its new Vega IP product line that brings GPU performance, API completeness and silicon cost-savings to SOC manufacturers addressing the global market for high performance, battery-efficient mass market devices – from wearables to streaming TV dongles to tablets and smartphones.

Vivante Vega series brings a variety of GPU innovations, including OpenGL ES 3.0 hardware functionality in the same total silicon footprint as the previous OpenGL ES 2.0 design. Vivante GPU cores will use unified stream processors that support double, single and half precision formats. The graphics cores also feature proprietary Vivante Vega lossless compression that reduces on-chip bandwidth by an average of 3.2:1 and streamlines the graphics subsystem including the GPU, composition processor (CPC), interconnect and display and memory subsystems. The new architecture also features hidden surface removal (HSR) that cuts render processing requirements by an average of 30%.

Vivante Vega graphics core will run at over 1GHz, but will feature up to 65% power saving over previous cores through Vega DVFS voltage scaling and incremental low power architecture enhancements. Finally, the new graphics core architecture sports industry’s smallest graphics driver memory footprint to enable graphics and compute in DDR-cost constrained systems all the way to DDR-less MCU/MPUs.

Leveraging seven years of architectural refinements learned from more than 100 Vivante partner mass market system-on-chips, Vega GPUs double graphics and compute performance over equivalent GC Series cores in the same mass market silicon footprint and provides support for the latest application programming interfaces (API), including OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL full profile. Vega IP cores will enable system on chip vendors to put the latest technologies into their products without compromising PPA (Power, Performance and Area) yet deliver high-quality user interface and app graphics and GPGPU compute on devices of any size. Vivante cores target a full range of products from tiny embedded Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and motion processors to large screen 4K/8K TVs.

“Combined with the trend of embedding visual intelligence into all products regardless of form factor, size or shape, the GPU is at the epicenter of these market trends and the driver for product differentiation. The GPU vendor that can deliver the most complete solution in an optimized package will win. Looking at the Vega product line, Vivante has an opportunity to hit the sweet spot for mass market manufacturers by combining API compatibility with performance and design flexibility in a small silicon package,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research and known authority in graphics and multimedia.

Vega is optimized for Google Android and Chrome products that need tomorrow’s 3D and GPU Compute standards today. Silicon proven to have the smallest die area footprint, graphics performance boost, and scalability across the entire product line, Vega cores extend Vivante’s current leadership in bringing all the latest standards to mass market consumer electronics in the smallest silicon area. Current licensable products in the Vega series include Vega 1X, 2X, 4X and 8X, based on target performance and market requirements.

“Vega allows mobile ecosystem hardware and software vendors to showcase their latest technologies across a large user base and keep innovation moving forward. Our goal when defining this new mass market product line was to enhance user experience on any device by accelerating the adoption of the latest visually stunning API features combined with OpenCL and Renderscript Compute/Filterscript. The initial product rollout of Vega was in the hugely successful Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 (Vega-Lite), which doubled graphics performance of its predecessor in half the die area. With design wins in 6 of the top 10 mobile OEMs, Vega builds on a robust foundation that continues to deliver the latest innovations to leading high volume products,” said Wei-Jin Dai, Vivante president and CEO.